This edition combines The Dream Songs, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969 and contains all 385 songs. Of The Dream Songs, A. Alvarez wrote in The Observer, "A major achievement. He has written an elegy on his brilliant generation and, in the process, he has also written an elegy on himself."
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Review
"The character of Henry [the hero of The Dream Songs] is a permanent addition to our literature."-James Schevill
"A major achievement . . . [Berryman] has written an elegy on his brilliant generation and, in the process, he has also written an elegy on himself."-A. Alvarez, The Observer
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
"A major achievement . . . [Berryman] has written an elegy on his brilliant generation and, in the process, he has also written an elegy on himself."-A. Alvarez, The Observer
About the Author
John Berryman was born in Oklahoma in 1914. The author of several volumes of poetry, of which The Dream Songs is considered his masterwork, he died, a suicide, in 1972.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
41 of 43 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Curse you John Berryman! You have ruined my ear for other poets. THE DREAM SONGS is one of those award-winning modern epics you wonder why you are reading until near the end, when you realize that you have slipped completely into the author's syntaxes, thoughts and, yes, dreams.
Don't let Berryman in his forward tell you different: this book is baldly autobiographical. Berryman dubbed himself Henry, gave a voice to his traumatized psyche (Mr. Bones) and set them talking, unraveling a lifetime of scholarship mixed with pain.
If you have read about Berryman, you will see him instantly in THE DREAM SONGS. Yet, unlike Robert Lowell, Berryman doesn't assume a familiarity with his biography that verges on solipsism. It is enough to know his father killed himself, Berryman killed himself, Berryman had affairs, was an alcoholic, was married several times and that he dearly loved literature, especially Shakespeare, some of whose Sonnets he parodies.
There is no narrative to the 385 Songs, per se. They come in thematic groups, which are grouped into seven 'books' and, like diary entries, chronicle whatever is on Henry's mind, which is often the untimely deaths other poets, such as Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath. Like most "modern" poetry, THE DREAM SONGS is a tough slog through sentences that may or may not make sense. Except if you read them enough and carefully, they start making sense. It's a magical effect, but not gained without some serious struggle.
The poems themselves are incomparable to anything I've read before. Berryman borrows aspects of African-American English and WCWesque directness. He composes dehydrated, idiosyncratically-punctuated sentences that straddle stanzas of six lines, often rhymed and never predictable in length.
... Read more ›21 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
He was out of his own mind for years." The first lines of Dream Song #155 were written about another author but remind me of Berryman himself, whose struggle with depression and alcoholism was lifelong and whose innovative, compressed cadences continue to haunt me-- especially those of these 385 Dream Songs. You can recognize a D.S. straightaway if it revolves around a bumbling character named Henry (sort of a more bitter, more desperate, more adorable Homer Simpson) and/or his part-time interlocutor, Mr. Bones. The D.S.s are also characterized by this odd, oblique syntax (which at different times mimics Black dialect, pedantic jargon, and the flat speech of the mentally unstable). More or less all of them are written in a form I believe J.B. created: three six-line stanzas with an occasional orphan punch line and some irregular, slanted end-rhyme.
With 385 x 18 = almost 7000 lines, this is the book they should have called "100 Years of Solitude"; I've only lived through the first half-century myself. But what keeps me reading is the fact that this drowning man's poems can clutch and so tightly *hold* the greased pig of life, in all its sloppy, despairing, goofy, grandiose, horrified, exultation. Between the bleakness of his free-floating, unremitting guilt ("But never did Henry, as he thought he did, / end anyone and hacks her body up"), and his pathetic and bawdy speculations ("What wonders is / she sitting on, over there?"), our lovable and unloved Henry, "pried / open for all the world to see, survived." Though Berryman himself ultimately lost his own decades-long fight against suicide, stalwart Henry lives on and, as the first Dream Song tells us,
"What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
...this book, a masterpiece of syntax and characterization. I first read Berryman's Dream Song 69 over 12 years ago. That poem drew me to this book, which has never left me since then. I have moved to other continents, and this is the one volume I would not think of leaving behind. Even when I have been in the hospital, I am sure to pack "The Dream Songs." I cannot explain why this strange and marvelous book affects me so deeply, but I could not possibly give it any higher praise. Yes, there are lulls. Certainly, there are poems which pale in comparison to others, but the work as a whole is a dazzling accomplishment. No one sounds quite like Berryman: he heaves a word like an axe and in the next stroke caresses the reader with infinite tenderness. Berryman is unique, his conversations unmistakable, and his genius lies in his wit and honesty. No other book-length poem compares to this. Throughout the elegies, the arias, the schizoid self-confidence and despair, Henry emerges a character not easily surpassed in poetry, or in literature at all.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
"Man, I been thirsty" -- Berryman's explanation in *The Dream Songs* of why he drank so much for so long. And he was: thirstier, hungrier, lustier, more curious and more ambitious than anyone around him -- and ultimately, too, sadder, lonelier, more tragic. Yes, the later sections are too long and sometimes not inspired enough -- Berryman is, indeed, sometimes boring, though we must not say so. But when he's sharp, it's as a whip, and when he's hot, it's as an iron: nobody flashes and yearns like this "brain from hell." The first and last Dream Songs (1 and 385) are among the sweetest, saddest poems I know; # 14 is perhaps the most true; and # 4 is, quite possibly, the greatest poem about lust in the English language. Feast, and enjoy!
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Berryman: The Underrated American Scholar & Poet
I've been studying John Berryman's life and work for decades and I needed a new copy of his "Dream Songs." This is my favorite edition and it was in mint condition.
Published 1 month ago by Allen Mahan
4.0 out of 5 stars
the chronicles of Henry the Sniveler, poet of brilliance ...
This assemblage of six line stanzas, in precarious sonnet form, that is, Henry's de facto form, finds the text crammed and twisted, the poetic content bewilderingly mashed into... Read more
Published on December 28, 2009 by Matt Hill
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant, Baffling & Beautiful
Don't start this book with the expectation that you will read it from first page to last as you would a novel or many other long poems because if you do you will only end up... Read more
Published on August 29, 2009 by J. J. Lisandrillo
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't be put off
Don't be put off. It daunts one at first. Flip through till you find the right one, then skip around. There are gems in here, and the more you keep looking, the more you find. Read more
Published on June 9, 2009 by M. Greenberg
5.0 out of 5 stars
LIKE LISTENING TO JAZZ
I learned about The Dream Songs through The Writer's Almanac. I bought the book because of the stellar Amazon reviews. I'm hooked. This poetry is like no other. Read more
Published on May 25, 2009 by Miss Pam
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Rest of the Story
The /mandatory/ companion to Berryman's /Collected Poems/, as Berryman isn't Berryman without the /Dream Songs/. Read more
Published on August 17, 2008 by Dennis M. Hammes
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unique voice and stucture.
'I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.'
He was a suicide with abandon, a feeling that permeates every word in this collection of thoughts and dreams. Read more
He was a suicide with abandon, a feeling that permeates every word in this collection of thoughts and dreams. Read more
Published on February 24, 2008 by crank
5.0 out of 5 stars
dream songs aren't meant to be understood, understand?
the main point of criticism of this poem is its hyper-personal self-referential content. i have to say, however, that i have never felt so comforted, so saddened nor so delighted... Read more
Published on December 16, 2007 by mark twain
4.0 out of 5 stars
Loose Ballads
At first, I didn't find much to rejoice about in this collection of poems. The expectation Berryman sets up with his title is deceptive. I found little evidence of "dream. Read more
Published on September 27, 2005 by Janee J. Baugher
5.0 out of 5 stars
To like without much understanding
I am not very knowledgable about Berryman and his work. I certainly have not read the poems with the time and intensity of a number of the reviewers on this site. Read more
Published on November 9, 2004 by Shalom Freedman
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